[Squeakfoundation]re: release process (was "Shrinking alpha image")

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Sun Mar 23 01:10:17 CET 2003


On Saturday, March 22, 2003, at 03:05 AM, Craig Latta wrote:

>> A few questions it should answer -
>> * How do we know what the community will come up with beforehand?
>
> 	We don't need to read minds. We can just decide that features get
> *scheduled* before they get included. E.g., if you come up with some
> whizzy new feature during the 3.6 cycle, you can suggest it for a 
> future
> feature schedule (3.7 or later).
>
> 	Of course there will be some deviation from the ideal. For example,
> critical fixes often get special dispensation (inclusion into the
> current schedule instead of waiting for a future schedule). In general,
> though, I think it's good to encourage planning the next several
> releases. In particular, at any given time there are usually large
> features (e.g., changing the format of compiled methods) that one can
> imagine happening in the next major release as opposed to the next 
> minor
> release.

This sounds generally good.

The only tweak I would make is that the number of items which get 
"special dispensation" (inclusion into the current schedule) could be 
fairly large, as long as they are small fixes/enhancements without 
major ramifications.  This would include both critical and minor fixes 
harvested from the sqfixes page, and also minor enhancements.  (During 
the alpha stage of course.)  We want to have a reasonably quick 
turnaround on these smaller items; postponing them to the next release 
as a general rule would be too long.

As an example, I can imagine that several dozen bugfixes may go into 
3.6 without being in the plan.  A bugfix with major ramifications 
(which is arguably more than just a "bugfix") should be part of a 
scheduled plan, though.

Perhaps one way to address this is to just have "miscellaneous bug 
fixing" or similar as part of each plan/schedule.  Eh, that's sort of 
cheesy. ;-)  Although there may be times when we want to include in our 
plan that we want to hold off on minor fixes/enhancements for a couple 
of weeks before some massive change is made, for example.

Another thing that we can do is, when reviewing items on sqfixes, if a 
submission seems like too large/widespread a change for inclusion in 
the current schedule, we can add a comment/opinion stating that it 
needs to be discussed further on this list and should be part of a plan 
for a future release.

- Doug Way



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